14 DAY TRIAL // Even though there is still quite a bit of time left until the first Nvidia Kal-El-powered devices will make their entrance into the market, the Santa Clara company has already finalized some of the specs of the fourth generation Tegra SoC, which will be released under the “Wayne” code name.
This news comes from the Bright Side of News website, which was informed about these specifications by a source close to Nvidia who asked not to be identified.
According to that source, the graphics card maker wants to build two separate versions of Wayne in order to address the needs of a wide range of devices including smartphones, tablets, netbooks and notebooks.
The first version is a quad-core design, based on a yet-undisclosed ARM architecture (most probably Cortex-A15) which will include at least a 24-core GPU that resembles the contemporary graphics architectures.
For the four ARM cores, Nvidia is targeting the 1.5GHz clock speed, which should deliver triple-digit GFLOPS performance, while also keeping the per-core power consumption of the Kal-El SoC.
The second Wayne silicon is much more powerful than the first version, as it packs no less than eight ARM processing cores and 32 to 64 GPU cores that are DirectX 11+ compliant and also support OpenGL 4.x and OpenCL 1.x as well as PhysX.
This chip is designed to go head to head with both ARM-based and x86 processors and should be used in tablets, netbook and ultra-low-power notebooks up to 13.3-inch in screen size.
Nvidia plans to release its next-generation SoC (system-on-a-chip) at about the same time as the Windows 8 operating system, which means that Wayne should arrive in October of 2012.
The company will start sending prototype silicon to manufacturers and software developers in December 2011.